Young men in fear of a life stifled by marriage

If men ever dared to reflect wistfully on former glories of patriarchy, high on the list would be the freedom once enjoyed by the man of the house to come and go as he pleased. That's long gone. The married man today rarely has rights to control his own leisure. Hell, no. He's now on a leash, a very short leash.

Take a look at the recent sex survey, The Australian Study of Health and Relationships, published in April by La Trobe University. It suggested fewer men may be paying for sex, with older men significantly more likely to have used prostitutes than younger ones, despite the fact that such illicit activities have traditionally been dominated by the young.

Are men being scared off by concerns about sexually transmitted diseases? Or is that there's no longer any need to pay for sex, given the abundance of willing women?

Perhaps, but there's also the interesting possibility that men simply aren't being allowed the unrestricted leisure that they once enjoyed. Men's unrestricted leisure time has been shrinking for some time, according to Dr Michael Bittman from the Social Policy Research Centre at the University of NSW. Bittman's analysis of the Australian Bureau of Statistics' time-use data shows a steep drop in men's "out-of-home leisure" from the mid-1970s. He's tracked the decline through to the late '90s and suggests it's likely to have continued. A man can still enjoy his leisure - the beer in front of the TV, kicking the football with the kids - but these days his fun is largely of the carefully monitored domestic variety.

This has seen the end of the fine Australian custom of slipping off to the pub to knock back a few ales after work. The local is fast disappearing, according to the University of Sydney sociologist Annette Falahey, who has just completed a PhD on drinking practices in Sydney. ");document.write("

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The pub was once a place men "could call their own", she says, a place which provided them with a sense of belonging to their "community of mates". Falahey lists many factors leading to the decline of the local - tough drink-driving laws, the introduction of pokies, competition from restaurants and clubs.

There's much happening to push men out of the pubs but this may count for little compared with what's tugging them home.

Men are expected not to stray too far, too often. Out-of-home leisure - all-day weekend golf or days at the dogs - has to compete with the new demands placed on men by their wives and children. Few men can resist pressures to become more domesticated, to take their turn wiping snotty noses and sorting darks from whites. But complicating matters are today's delayed breeding patterns. With the average marrying age for males in the late 20s, the peak breeding period coincides with the 30s career push, making for a time-squeeze that leaves little room for leisure.

Doug Stevens, a social science researcher at the Auckland University of Technology, has analysed time-use data to show that during this early breeding period - when families have children under five - men spend 4.2 per cent more time working than their wives do (when paid work hours are combined with household work). Time spent by men working at home increases - they do slightly less housework but significant amounts of child care - but there's also a dramatic 41.5 per cent increase in time spent in paid work. The mother's time in paid employment drops (by 18.7 per cent) and while she has a huge increase in child-care time, overall the female total work time comes in slightly under the male's.

So the life of the married man is far from beer and skittles - as younger men seem to be noticing. While in the past most men took on the responsibilities of marriage and children as very young adults, now much of that first decade they are fancy-free. And perhaps the sight of their older married brothers straining at the leash is giving them pause.

When the American National Marriage Project surveyed young men about their marriage intentions last year, they found "the freedom of not having to be responsible to anyone else" as one main reason men were reluctant to marry. The researchers concluded that "like Henry Higgins, these young men fear losing their solitary pleasures by 'letting a woman in their life' ".